Slashdot Mirror

Drachan writes "A seminar at the UK's (BBC sponsored) technology conference 'Open Tech 2005' (organised by the fantastic 'Need To Know' (NTK) team as a follow on to last year's "Notcon 2004"event) posed the question 'Where is the British EFF?' The answer, as prompted by those attending the seminar was, of course 'Nowhere! so... uhh.. well... why don't We create it?' A PledgeBank page was set up within a few hours (available here) which states that the pledging person will donate £5 (GBP) per month to the support of a British EFF-style organisation provided that 1000 others also agree to do so. There is considerably more information at Danny O'Brien's Oblomovoka. Maybe this is a step in the right direction, after all the controversy over ID cards, the Anti-Terrorism Bill and general UK political disaster?"

Alex Moskalyuk writes "For 17 years, a British programmer who calls herself Verity Stob has been entertaining the readers of Dr. Dobbs Journal, EXE and The Register with her witty humor and variety of writing styles, which has now been collected into book form. In the foreword to the book, Danny O'Brien from NTK says that before the days of Dilbert, Futurama, User Friendly and Slashdot, the market for geek humor was dangerously under-served. So Verity attempted to add a little humor." Read on for the rest of Moskalyuk's review. The Best of Verity Stob author Verity Stob pages 316 publisher APress rating 6 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 1590594428 summary Highlights Of Verity Stob's Famous Columns From EXE, Dr Dobb's Journal, And The Register

Stob's writing is hard to categorize. It's both humor and satire, sometimes just overwhelmingly funny and sometimes barely causing a chuckle. It's British, so some things passed way over my head. Since she started her writing back in 1998, there are references to mainframes, Unisys systems and the days when you would call tech support and instantly get a human being on the other end. Nevertheless, the book is entertaining, although it's more of a coffee table book, where you can pick it up and start on any page, than book where you'd go chapter-by-chapter.

Her humor is original and versatile. Poems, stories, scripts, hacked diaries, parodies -- the book has them all: after all, it's a collection of the best of her writing. She's an experienced C++ programmer who had been in the Windows world for a while, so frequently the jokes relate to C++ peculiarities. Such as Thirteen ways to loathe VB (written in 2000):

Calling functions and accessing arrays. In most languages you can distinguish between a call to function F with parameter 3 an a reference to an array F with index 3, because one is written F(3) and the other F[3]. In Visual Basic they're both written F(3). Yes.

Her 2001 article for DDJ is actually nothing but a screenshot of a page called Dotdotdot with the subtitle Where nerds go on and on and on and... followed by a paragraph-long article titled Microsoft does something and a bunch of upset comments from the readers including a poster spelling out Look at me! in large letters in the first post.

Or her parody of George Orwell's 1984 which talks about Way After 1984 and describes Winston Smith's typical day:

As he entered the lobby, a breeze stirred the 60-foot banner suspended high above from the roof. The three oh-so-familiar slogans of the Ministry were printed across the banner in large letters: REGISTRATION NOT LEGISLATION MONOPOLISATION IS INNOVATION WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY?

See another sample of her writing, which those who've had to go through code reviews will especially appreciate.

The book is organized chronologically, with Verity's early writings listed first, and some of the unpublished material included at the end of the book. Overall, it's a pretty good and entertaining read, although in many cases the chapters made me scratch my head trying to get to the point of the joke. It's especially difficult with parodies, since if you don't quite know what is being parodied, it's hard to get the joke. The Register has another review and those British journalists called it painfully funny.

You can purchase The Best of Verity Stob from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

NTK was kind enough to point out the Inkulator 9000, software to render pen-and-ink style drawings from 3D meshes. NTK also points to a number of other handy tools and papers.

NickFitz writes "Need To Know this week has a piece about Dirac, a BBC R&D project to produce a video codec, which has been released as an Open Source project. From BBCi: 'Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced... Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions.'"

NickFitz writes "Need To Know this week has a piece about Dirac, a BBC R&D project to produce a video codec, which has been released as an Open Source project. From BBCi: 'Dirac is a general-purpose video codec aimed at resolutions from QCIF (180x144) to HDTV (1920x1080) progressive or interlaced... Our algorithm seems to give a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG-2 for high definition video (e.g. 1920x1080 pixels), its original target application. It has been further developed to optimise it for internet streaming resolutions.'"

A reader writes: " It appears that Ken Coar will be doing an IRC chat on Slashnet today. Ken's an Apache core developer and director, as well as author of The Apache Cookbook." It's worth noting that DevChannel is part of the sinister keiretsu. As pointed out, it'll be in #forum, at 2:00 PM EST today.

NTK's weekly list of useful stuff includes a pointer to Javascrypt, a Javascript-based encryption utility. Handy.

Thanks to NTK for their article about a gamer taking the UK games trade body to task over their anti-backup FAQs. According to the piece, "Rogue gamer Stuart Campbell [is] tackling [UK-based] games-biz body ELSPA, this time over the informatively incorrect FAQ on their website. 'Am I legally entitled to make a backup of my original software?' you ask; they used to unequivocally answer: 'No'." But Stuart found evidence allegedly allowing "a lawful user of a copy of a computer program to make any back-up copy of it" in a 1988 UK law, and whether definitely true or not, ELSPA have "...now modified the wording to warn against backing up the 'film and sound' copyrights which they believe games inevitably contain." Campbell was previously involved in the Fairplay campaigns against cheating slot machines and overpriced videogames.

don.g writes "As reported by NTK, ESR appears to have embarked apon the process of recasting the Jargon File in his own image, adding terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GhandiCon" that he dreamt up and seemingly no-one else uses, and various terms from (of all places) the warblogging community, where he is active. He's also updated the "Hacker Politics" page to be more closely aligned with his own views."

Warrior-GS writes "The final part of the Future of PC Gaming is up at GameSpy. This one deals with the future of user-created games and talks to developers and mod makers, as well as identifying tools that can assist them. There is also a Q&A with Warren Spector on where he thinks PC gaming is headed in the next several years." John Scabadone points to a "nice article featuring an update on the state of the handheld gaming industry along with a roundtable of some of the premier developers." Read on below for several more gaming updates, too.

pandrew writes "Square has openly admitted to doing something people have been asking for for many years now: a sequel! Though not what most people have asked for (i.e. Final Fantasy 7) this is still a very big step in the Final Fantasy line, since no game in the series has ever had a follow up with a connecting storyline."

k-hell writes "The Mother of All Games, Scorched Earth has been updated to allow for playing on Internet. Rendered in OpenGL, Scorched 3D now features a 3D island environment and LAN and Internet play. See screenshots here. You can download a Windows binary package and/or Windows source package here. At the same time, you should also grab the excellent server browser The All-Seeing Eye."

Lucifer writes "'Sega announced a list of new Sega AGES game titles for PlayStation 2, remakes of their classic Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn titles. Each game will retail for 2500 yen, and the first four titles are scheduled to release in Japan in summer 2003.' 15 years later and I'm going to start playing Phantasy Star again! ;-)"

Finally, bredroll writes "Attention fellow Geeks! Ever wanted to live 100ft underground in a ex British gov't nuclear bunker for three days and do nothing but geek at extreme levels and play LAN games? Well, we can help, This year's event includes food and bunks as well,

In-Bunker Events

• Battle Royale (Robot Wars-type event)
• Underground Noise Fest (see site)
• High-speed switched LAN
• Various LAN game tournaments
• NTK will be there
• + more ....

Users of all systems welcome, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac, anything, the more diverse the better. The bunker is located in Essex (UK) near the town of Brentwood. Details about booking places and prices are on our site."

yogi writes "Oxford University Students' Union had a debate last Thursday, titled This House believes that 'the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music.'. Ordinarily, not too exciting, but since it is the Oxford Union, they get Hilary Rosen to speak. She lost the debate, and had to have pictures like this taken. Read the writeup at NTK, or a more detailed one here. I especially like the bit where she asked all the file downloaders whether it made them buy more music."

philkerr writes "I've just been informed by the UK Patent Office, below, that the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive, the equivalent EU legislation to the DMCA) consultation paper has been released. It's important that we give feedback to the UK government that this legislation will have a chilling effect on the software industry." NTK has a few choice words on the subject as well. We've done several articles on the EUCD before, and Alan Cox has been campaigning against it, but it appears that the fix is in: Europe is going to get DMCA-like laws implemented in each nation by the end of 2002.

Izeickl writes "The BBC is running an article about sysadmin day. One admin is quoted saying, 'We are unappreciated and no-one knows what we do for 364 days of the year.' Apparently even the online greeting cards are getting in on the action check out 123Greetings.com and put a smile on that cranky admins face! The starter of this day also has a page here." Well, most competent sysadmins probably have electronic greeting cards blocked at the router, but I suppose it's the thought that counts... Jeremy Sieminski submits a Mouse Pad Couch as the appropriate place for a sysadmin to rest his weary, uh, wrists. And of course if you've never read the BOFH stories, you're missing out.

dcsmith writes: "This article at the Need To Know web site reports that the free(as in beer) e-mail arm of Yahoo has been replacing certain words in messages received by yahoo.com e-mail accounts. In an apparent attempt to forestall cross-site scripting attacks, 'mocha' becomes 'espresso' and 'free expression' becomes 'free statement'... My personal favorite - since medieval contains the text "eval", it is altered to 'medireview' ... Check Google for the number of web sites containing medireview." Kwelstr points to this story at New Scientist as well.

A reader writes " NTK Magazine and Mute Magazine are holding a Festival of Inappropriate Technology in London city centre on the 9th of June. Featuring the Commodore 64 underground, The Classic Amiga Preservation Society, DNSCon, the EFF plus many more talks and stalls. There will also be wired and wireless network access available. The Register will also be there. Should make for a great day, all are welcome!"

Azar writes "An article at Newsforge details the experience of installing Linux on Wal-Mart's OS-less PC. It states: 'A few months ago, super-sized discount store Wal-Mart made the headlines in the Linux world by becoming the first major U.S. retailer to offer PCs without Windows preloaded...While this was widely hailed in the Open Source community as a victory over the "Microsoft tax," which usually afflicts buyers of Linux PCs, one major question remained unanswered: How well do these machines support Linux?' Here is your answer." Newsforge is owned by OSDN, which also owns Slashdot, is all part of the sinister Andover keiretsu.

Roger Clarke is an computer scientist who attends many of the CFP conferences, and more importantly for our purposes, takes notes. His notes for this year's conference make good reading and cover a wide variety of issues that Slashdot touches upon. Privacy, biometrics, domain names, the digital divide, intellectual property, it's all here. NTK this week has a nice quip on the conference: "And the more the CFPers confer, the more they seemed to realise that Hollywood is going for the hat-trick: taking away freedom, privacy *and* computers. Pretty impressive. But only if they manage it."

toadnine writes "Things you never imagined you could do with Python and a 2.4 kernel... check out SUBTERFUGUE. (Source: Need To Know)." A blue pill for applications.

Derek Jeter writes "NTK.net is reporting in their weekly newsletter that another copy restricted CD has surfaced, this time Michael Jackson's newest single, "Rock Your World". "When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank or corrupted CDR." Ughh, Doesn't this violoate the Red Book Standard?" I wonder how long before MP3s of this song exist despite the copy protection. So far its just free promotional copies of the single. I tell ya I'm gonna be pissed the first time I buy a CD and discover I can't listen to it in my computer.

Derek Jeter writes "NTK.net is reporting in their weekly newsletter that another copy restricted CD has surfaced, this time Michael Jackson's newest single, "Rock Your World". "When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank or corrupted CDR." Ughh, Doesn't this violoate the Red Book Standard?" I wonder how long before MP3s of this song exist despite the copy protection. So far its just free promotional copies of the single. I tell ya I'm gonna be pissed the first time I buy a CD and discover I can't listen to it in my computer.

Well, I join slashdot (aka the "sinister Andover keiretsu") full-time today. It seems worthy of a story, although I'll limit it to the YRO section since those have been my traditional stomping grounds. There's no real news below, just some rambling and question-asking, but I hope it will be interesting nonetheless.

My previous job was at the U.S. Department of Energy, where I did web programming for them. Mostly placing huge databases on-line using Cold Fusion. For the last year I've also been a slashdot author/editor part-time, mostly posting YRO stories - encryption, free speech, privacy, etc. Prior that I was studying engineering; prior to that I was in the U.S. military. I turn 27 in a few days.

This job is not a programming job. Although I am fairly familiar with perl, the people working on slashcode and other projects for Andover/VA Linux/OSDN (even we don't know what to call it - OSDN is probably the current official name, but the stationery still says Andover on it...) would run rings around me, so it's doubtful that I could make much of a contribution right now.

Instead, and against all odds, this is a journalism job. This may seem odd for someone who has a partial quote from Kierkagaard as one of my random .sig quotes:

"The demoralization which comes from the press can be seen from this fact: There are not ten men in every generation who, socratically, are afraid of having a wrong opinion; but there are thousands and millions who are more frightened of standing alone, even with an opinion which is quite right, than of anything else. But when something is in the papers, it is eo ipso certain that there is always a good number of people having that opinion or about to express it.

Indeed, if the press were to hang a sign out like every other trade, it would have to read: Here men are demoralized in the shortest possible time on the largest possible scale for the smallest possible price.

What we need is Pythagorean silence. There is a far greater need for total-abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol.

When truth conquers with the help of 10 000 yelling men --even supposing that that which is victorious is a truth: with the form and manner of the victory a far greater untruth is victorious.

The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word "Journalist." ... If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should not despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist, and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up."

Kierkagaard doesn't have a whole lot of faith in the press. Honestly, neither do I. Since I started paying attention to net-activism and politics (circa 1995), I've seen that most journalism is incredibly biased, based on lies and innuendo and press releases and product promotion. Any controversial issue is surrounded by at least two different sides telling stories that are, for the most part, entirely fabricated. Reporters are sometimes complicit in this, and sometimes simply lazy or misled. But the result is the same either way: readers get total crap, and are told it is unbiased reporting.

I hope to change that. Not by shooting all the other reporters in the world; that's too big of a job. Nor by trying to set a good example by being unbiased and impartial myself; that too is too big of a job. Instead I think what I will try to avoid is any suggestion that I am unbiased. Here, let's make it clear: I AM BIASED .

Here are some of my biases (partial list only, the slashdot database couldn't hold a full listing, nor could this keyboard withstand that many keystrokes):

• pro free speech - there's no substitute.
• pro encryption - see above item. Encrypted speech is speech.
• pro privacy - and pro privacy legislation, since self-help solutions are inadequate.
• pro Linux - but only because I think it's a good OS with lots of potential, I'm not a fanatic about it. I'm typing this on Win 98 right now.
• anti corporations - the mega-corps hate democracy, and they hate human rights. That's their nature - those things tend to get in the way of maximizing profits. The screwy thing is that many people are convinced we have to let them behave that way, like it's some kind of natural law. No. We don't.
• anti copyright, patents, and other forms of government monopolies - these do very little good in today's world. They need to be scaled back or eliminated. The original purpose of these monopolies was to make sure useful information was disseminated widely - that objective is now trivial with the advent of the internet. Yet copyright and patent laws keep expanding, not contracting. Why? Because if you make a fortune from a government monopoly, you have the money to lobby for a larger monopoly. It's a very dangerous feedback loop that must be broken.
• pro science, in all its forms - interesting science is interesting on its face and independent of what they're actually trying to achieve. I think I've given up on my boyhood dream of trying to go to space, but you never know - there's still enough time for me to make it out there if we got our act together.

I hope that's enough for a small taste. I'm trying to dispel all notion that I'm unbiased, or that I'll be presenting everything in an entirely unbiased fashion. If my biases totally offend you, you might want to go right now to your user preferences and check the box to block stories posted by me.

I do hope to avoid the worst excesses - the hatchet jobs, the total lies, the made-up stories. But I won't avoid those because I'm trying to be unbiased, I'll avoid those because they aren't fucking true. I'm a stickler for accuracy; it comes of being an INTP.

I took this job for a number of reasons. I had been at the DOE for three years; time for a change. I enjoyed the stuff I was doing part-time as a net activist and slashdot editor. They pay better than the DOE. It's a full-time telecommute job - I live in New York City, Andover is headquartered outside Boston. They're all good reasons. But probably the main reason is that I think this stuff is important. The next few years are going to determine the shape of the internet to come. It is quite possible that we could end up with a net that looks a lot like, say, cable television. A fair number of choices, but not one of them is anything other than mass-market pablum. Like most people, I want to make a difference in the world. I think that the opportunity exists here.

So, that should be enough about me. If you don't have a pretty good idea of where I'm coming from by now, you never will. Time for some questions to you.

What do you want out of slashdot? What would you like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Again, my primary interests are in things loosely known as cyber-liberties and scientific endeavors - it is there that I'm most likely to be able and interested in making direct and meaningful changes in the content of slashdot.

I was about to do another list, of suggestions and what-not. But why put my thumb on the balance? I'll just ask again: what do you want to see out of slashdot, that you think I can do?

P.S.: Anyone in NYC want to get together and have a beer or something?

Motor writes: "The very excellent weekly newsletter NTK (Need To Know) tipped me off about galeon - a desperately needed attempt to build a mere browser (as opposed to an entire operating system/xterm/game console) using the best bit of the Mozilla project: gecko." I wondered how long before someone did this. Very excellent looking.

As you may already know, 30,000 Napster users have appealed to Napster on the basis that they feel they've done nothing wrong in the recent Metallica-inspired crackdown on accounts. Rap artist Dr. Dre has turned in his list to Napster, and we can only assume that there will be appeals there, too. Also, after numerous attempts and promises from Metallica's publicist, we still haven't gotten Metallica to answer the questions that our readers asked on May 4th. We have made several good-faith efforts to work with Metallica and their publicist, but it looks like they're never going to respond. On the lighter side, The Onion has posted the sad news about Kid Rock, and someone sent this image to us. [Updated 18 May 2000 7:40 GMT by timothy] Metallica's publicists have promised to try to get our questions answered "early next week," and that would be both more fun and more satisfying for all involved, I'm sure, than stony silence and accusations. Attn: Lars: The real debate is online :)

Amoeba Protozoa has the first Quickie for the day: The Linux Image Montage Project needs logos to create a montage poster. If you have a Linux related logo, send it to them. mazeone sent us a link to the always excellent NTK which has a great note about Bruce Perens at the start, (And yes, I read NTK too ;) And now a whole bunch of fun little links that have been building up: PopeClayton sent us a link to a Homer Simpson Fortune File. cpfeifer sent us a link to another O'Reily Book Parody. Zibalatz sent us a link to a MacBeth Star Wars Parody. rpm sent us a link to the Magic Nipple. It predicts the future. Sorta. Now we have a few more Porn Parody sites: desertAngel sent us Amish Porn and Gambit32 sent us telephone sex. Both are hilarious. The Only Anonymous Coward sent us a link to an emergency Security Alert: apparently a dangerous bug was found in GNU acronym. An anonymous reader sent us an important page: a Guide to Babes for Geeks. Follow these to the letter. Oh wait, most of us probably already do. That might explain my social life anyway.

ntk writes "We've started a grass roots campaign against the UK government's plans to limit strong encryption in Britain. Worried slashdotters might like to check out the @dopt-an-MP site to see how they can help." And read ntk. It's cool.

An Anonymous contributor wrote to us "NTK is reporting JAMIE ZAWINSKI's forthcoming sabbatical from Netscape (about time, too, judging from his personal page's posts: "my employer can blow me and "really bad attitude": Netscape has pulled all the about: sites, and Microsoft has subpoenaed all the posts from the Netscape in house Really Bad Attitude mailing list." (Ed: I should remember that when venting frustration at work: not in an email)

Don Antonio sent us a link to a site where you can *cough* club a seal. I love this world. Lee Maguire writes "According to a recent usenet post from their Director od Communications, Mainframe are to announce a deal with The Cartoon Network to show all episodes of the CGI cartoon ReBoot (quite popular with computer/sci-fi geeks like me..) - this includes the eagerly awaited third season. " Mark Ashton wrote in to tell us about a Student-run conference in Champaign, Illinois. Speakers include Bjarne Stroustrup and Theo de Raat. Mike Miller wrote in to mention that The Linux Mall now has a floatable 'Linux Headline News Stories' window which updates every 5 minutes. Is it worth adding something like that here or not? Lastly, everybody and their mother wrote in to tell me that Linux 2.1.118 is now available in the usual places.

Hey guys, it's spring break for me, so rather then spend the next hour entering articles, here's a list of quickies: Danny O'Brien sent in a link to NTK Live show, the RealAudio version of Need to Know, the very cool weekly geek 'zine. Vladimir Vuksan wrote in to tell us that Netscape is having a party to celebrate Open Source. Funny stuff on that page. Next Dave Finton sent in this link about how employers use the net to find info on potential employees. Finally we have BeOS Releasing another beta sent in by Hans Veneman. Now to find my beer, a copy of Fantasia, and stick in some Floyd.

Hey guys, it's spring break for me, so rather then spend the next hour entering articles, here's a list of quickies: Danny O'Brien sent in a link to NTK Live show, the RealAudio version of Need to Know, the very cool weekly geek 'zine. Vladimir Vuksan wrote in to tell us that Netscape is having a party to celebrate Open Source. Funny stuff on that page. Next Dave Finton sent in this link about how employers use the net to find info on potential employees. Finally we have BeOS Releasing another beta sent in by Hans Veneman. Now to find my beer, a copy of Fantasia, and stick in some Floyd.

Yoz writes " Need To Know Now is described as "the weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the UK" but it's of relevance to all slashdot readers as it mostly covers worldwide news, it's written by geeks for geeks and it's very funny. Plus, it's linked to slashdot.org a couple of times recently, so there's obviously good taste at work here. You can subscribe to the mailshot or read all the issues at the website." I frequent the website myself actually. They misquoted me in their current issue though- I never "demanded" that Motif get set free. Why would I need a free motif when GTK is so cool and the source to Netscape will be here soon?

Yoz writes " Need To Know Now is described as "the weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the UK" but it's of relevance to all slashdot readers as it mostly covers worldwide news, it's written by geeks for geeks and it's very funny. Plus, it's linked to slashdot.org a couple of times recently, so there's obviously good taste at work here. You can subscribe to the mailshot or read all the issues at the website." I frequent the website myself actually. They misquoted me in their current issue though- I never "demanded" that Motif get set free. Why would I need a free motif when GTK is so cool and the source to Netscape will be here soon?